[mythtv-users] A beginner's questions (Linux and MythTV)

E James e_james at dsl.pipex.com
Mon Dec 24 04:30:11 UTC 2012


Hello to all.

It took me about a month to arrive at a satisfactory answer to the question "What exactly is linux?". At this time I don't understand what a mailing list is; how it functions; what is the etiquette. Please forgive and correct a beginner's mistakes.

A little background. I am a retired electrical power engineer (65 years old) with a lifelong interest in science and technology, science fiction and computers. I have done some programming - 1900 Fortran, 8060, 6502, Z80, Basic, Pascal, Object Pal and Visual Basic in roughly that order. I have been experimenting with linux since 2006 (Dapper Drake) and I think my main problem is that I don't really understand the modern world of technology - the social aspects rather than the technology itself. I still count myself a linux newbie and now a myth newbie as well.

I am also a newcomer to the field of digital television. Digital terrestrial television only became available at my location on 10th October. I am a keen television viewer and my primary objective is to record those programmes I want to watch as reliably, conveniently and cheaply as possible. I don't really care whether I use Windows or linux but my preference would be linux. So far, I have established that my Acer Aspire One D257 netbook is capable of recording at least 2 digital channels and playing back the recordings (Windows 7 starter, Media Portal and HDHomerun). On just one occasion, so far, I managed something similar using Mythbuntu on the same machine. They say "The devil's in the details" and he is certainly working hard for me.

I installed Mythbuntu (12.04 I think) twice, and each time, the first thing I saw was the message that the frontend can't connect to the backend. Based on my programming experience THIS SHOULD NOT HAPPEN but it does. A few days later it worked. I don't exactly know why but I suspect it might be related to the network environment - 2 different home networks, sometimes wired, sometimes wireless, sometimes both. Surely the IP address is irrelevant when it's connected via localhost? I don't like Mythbuntu because it's not general purpose - it took me several hours to figure out a procedure to get the wireless working. My wireless performance is good enough to record 1 channel but not 2, although there appears to be some sort of network glitch roughly every 80 seconds. I know this because I have discovered that recording from the HDHomerun tuner is very easy, it's using MythTV (or Media Portal) which is difficult. I am tempted to write my own capture application (it might be quicker and 
less hassle) but there are some programming details I would need to study first, such as how to send a Ctrl-C to the terminal. I also have MythTV and Lubuntu 12.10 on another netbook - Asus EeePC X101CH. I know the hardware can do the recording but, so far, I haven't achieved anything with MythTV (or Media Portal).

I have found that both Media Portal and MythTV will sometimes accept a scheduled recording instruction and then apparently ignore it. In the case of MythTV I think that the storage directory details are the main problem. How can MythTV record to a location among the system files? I thought user files couldn't be written there? How can I set the location to my main data partition (NTFS for sharing with Windows)? How do I ensure that the data partition is mounted at startup? What permissions do I need to set? In the not too long term I expect to be using at least 3 HDHomerun tuners. I have realised that this may have implications regarding how many computers I need or can use - master / slave backends etc.

I don't mind if you simply point me to web pages with the relevant information. If I don't understand what they say, I can come back and ask for more details. By the way, the netbook is not my only hard drive storage. I have been recording analogue television since 2003 and currently I have about 22TB connected to my network - 2 NAS boxes, 4 netbooks, 1 laptop, 2 desktops and 1 nettop.

Oh! and a Merry Christmas to all.


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